tateishi News

Blogs in the classroom

carol tateishi — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 22:03:30 GMT

Evidence that we are on the proverbial "cutting edge" and among small groups of teachers exploring the potential of tech and teaching, read this cnet article. One of the featured students is Jose Bernal, who is in Joel Arquillos's classroom at Galileo. Lots of really interesting ideas.
By the way, CNET News.com claims to report "news as it happens and to dissect important trends before others have even spotted them. Based in San Francisco, with bureaus in Boston, New York, Washington, Asia, and Europe, CNET News.com's editorial staff publishes more than 40 stories daily." A reporter from CNET spent part of a day at Galileo, interviewing Patrick, Joel and his students.

Claire: a challenging class

carol tateishi — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 19:54:35 GMT

Claire commented that: I have high hopes, but things this year have not gone as planned. I have 10 computers in my classroom, but we are not ready to turn them on quite yet. November is the goal. I think every few years, as an elementary school teacher, we get a class that is, well, let's say challenged. Routines, procedures, and rules are not sinking in quite as fast in this class. Technology will enter in around November, or at least that is the plan.

This is a good reminder of the importance of the context for using tech, even for such an experienced teacher and tech savvy teacher as Claire. It would be helpful to begin creating classroom-tested guidelines and procedures for getting students into tech to help other teachers.

First BAWP/Pearson residencies

carol tateishi — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 17:14:04 GMT

Over the past few weeks, I was able to visit our first residencies which took place in Fran Sheppard's 6th classes at Albany MS and Jennifer Dannenberg's 9th grade classes at Skyline HS in Oakland. So many things to mention, but I'll just comment on some highlights at this point:

* I was really struck with with the high levels of concentration and engagement by students and the quality of the collaboration within the groups of three to four. I'm used to students in writing groups and small discussion groups which can also be marked by lively engagement, but this was qualitatively different. I noticed the same things during the TI summer institute among TC's. It seems that multi-media projects and their need for multiple literacies draw on a much wider range of abilities, expertise and interest on the part of participants.

* About the writing: the actual texts students were producing were shaped by the kinds of genres asked for: poems and reports. The student script writing definitely reflected features of these genres. For the poems by the 6th graders, I noticed lots of attention to word choice, use of figurative language, interesting syntactical choices, and hyperbole. Poetry as the genre also lent itself to students choosing visually compelling images and a large degree of playfulness in language, images and editing, much like we'd expect to see in young people's poetry. The more report-like writing at the high school level, not surprisingly, paid more attention to organization. Each film followed the logic of a clear presentation of information. Accuracy and concrete detail guided word choice as students led us through, for example, a tour of Oakland and an overview of the sports program at Skyline High School. The images, too, were chosen for their capacity to capture essential aspects of the topic of the film. I think what is interesting to note is that even though the medium is multi media, students very much relied on their prior knowledge of the written genre in creating their scripts.

First TIE meeting

carol tateishi — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:59:05 GMT

Monday, Sept 26th is our first meeting of new TCs from the 2005 Summer Institute.

hot flash - reflection questions

carol tateishi — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:30:25 GMT

Click the headline to read the guiding questions for the year. (If it is too much effort to cursor to the headline, then click here.)

institute goals

carol tateishi — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 17:38:30 GMT

We have two interrelated goals: